How to Grow Currants (Black, Red & White)

Currants are one of those fruit shrubs that reward patience out of all proportion to the work you put in. Once established, a black, red, or white currant bush will hand you pounds of glossy, tart berries every summer for fifteen years or more, and it asks for little beyond a fertile patch of ground, an annual winter prune, and a watchful eye for a handful of pests. They are thornless, fully self-fertile, and shrug off winters that would kill a peach. If you garden somewhere with cold winters and summers that do not roast into the high 90s for weeks on end, currants belong in your plot. This guide walks through the whole cycle — choosing types, siting, planting, feeding, and the one thing that trips up most growers: the fact that blackcurrants and redcurrants want to be pruned in completely different ways.

About Currants and the Three Types

Currants are members of the genus Ribes, the same group that gives us gooseberries. The blackcurrant, Ribes nigrum, is a distinct species with strongly aromatic foliage and intense, musky-sweet fruit packed with vitamin C. The red and white currants, Ribes rubrum, are essentially the same species — white currants are simply an albino form of the red — and they share an identical growth habit and pruning regime. Knowing which camp your bush sits in matters enormously, because the two groups carry their fruit on different wood and demand opposite pruning strategies. Get the type wrong in your head and you can spend years cutting away exactly the growth that would have given you a crop.

In terms of flavor and use, blackcurrants are the bold one — they make the classic cordials, the French liqueur cassis, and deep, jammy preserves. Red and whitecurrants are tarter and more delicate, exceptionally high in pectin, which makes them the gardener’s first choice for sparkling-clear jellies and for stretching low-pectin fruit into a set. White currants are the mildest and sweetest of the three and are pleasant eaten fresh straight off the strig. A productive plot often carries one of each, since they ripen in a useful sequence and have overlapping but distinct seasons in the kitchen.

Climate and Site

Currants are cool-climate plants to their core. They are reliably hardy through USDA zone 3 and grow well up to about zone 8, but they genuinely need a period of winter cold to break dormancy and set a heavy crop — most varieties want several hundred hours below 45°F. The flip side is that they resent heat. In regions with long, hot, humid summers the plants struggle, mildew takes hold, and fruit quality drops. If you garden in a borderline-warm zone, give the bushes a spot with afternoon shade and steady moisture, and the red and white types in particular will cope.

Currants are more shade-tolerant than almost any other fruit you can grow. Blackcurrants crop most heavily in full sun, but red and whitecurrants will produce a respectable harvest with only a half day of direct light, which makes them invaluable for the cool, partly shaded corners where little else will fruit — against a north or east wall, for instance. What they will not forgive is dry, impoverished, or waterlogged soil. Aim for a deep, moisture-retentive but well-drained loam rich in organic matter, with a slightly acidic to neutral pH of around 6.0 to 6.5. Dig in a generous barrowload of well-rotted compost or manure before planting, and avoid frost pockets where late spring frosts can catch the early blossom.

Planting

The cheapest and most reliable way to start is with dormant bare-root bushes, planted any time the soil is workable from late fall through early spring. Bare-root stock establishes faster and costs a fraction of what container plants do. Soak the roots for an hour or two before planting if they look at all dry. Dig a hole wide enough to spread the roots fully, fork some compost into the base, and firm the plant in well so there are no air pockets around the roots. Space bushes 4 to 5 feet apart in the row, and the same between rows; they fill out into substantial shrubs and crowding only invites disease.

Here the two groups diverge again. Plant blackcurrants about 2 inches deeper than they sat in the nursery — bury the old soil mark — because this buried stem encourages a thicket of vigorous new shoots to spring from below ground, which is exactly the young wood the plant fruits on. Then cut the whole bush down hard, to about two buds above the ground, immediately after planting; you sacrifice the first year’s fruit but build a strong, multi-stemmed framework. Red and whitecurrants are the opposite: plant them at the same depth they grew before, sitting on a short clear “leg” of stem so the bush forms an open goblet on a single short trunk. Do not bury them, and do not cut them to the ground. Finally, mulch the root zone generously with compost or rotted manure to keep the roots cool and the moisture in — currants are surface-rooting and hate to dry out.

Watering and Feeding

Even moisture is the single biggest lever on currant yield. The plants need a steady supply of water from flowering right through fruit swell, and a dry spell as the berries are filling will leave you with small, hard fruit and a poor set the following year. In dry weather, water deeply once or twice a week rather than little and often, soaking the whole root zone, and keep that mulch topped up to buffer the soil against drying out. A drip line or soaker hose laid under the mulch is ideal because it keeps water off the foliage and reduces mildew.

Currants — and blackcurrants especially — are hungry feeders. Each spring, before the leaves are fully out, give the bushes a balanced feed with a good ratio of nitrogen to drive new growth and potassium to support flowering and fruit. A general-purpose fruit fertilizer at the recommended rate works well, supplemented by the annual mulch of compost or well-rotted manure, which feeds the soil slowly and conserves moisture at the same time. Avoid heavy doses of pure nitrogen, which push soft, sappy growth that aphids and mildew love. Blackcurrants will tell you they are underfed with pale leaves and weak shoots; respond with a top dressing and a thicker mulch. For more on building healthy soil and choosing companions across your whole fruit patch, browse the plants and flowers hub.

Pruning: The Critical Difference

If you remember one thing from this guide, make it this section. Blackcurrants and red/whitecurrants are pruned by completely different logic, and the reason is where each carries its fruit. Prune both in winter while the bushes are dormant, using clean, sharp secateurs, and always cut out anything dead, diseased, weak, or crossing first.

Pruning Blackcurrants

Blackcurrants fruit best on wood produced the previous summer — young, one-year-old shoots. Older wood becomes progressively less productive, so the whole goal of pruning is to keep a constant supply of fresh young growth coming from the base. This is called stooling. After the establishment years, the routine each winter is simple: remove about one third of the oldest, darkest, three-year-old-and-older stems right down to ground level, taking out roughly the most worn-out third of the bush each year. This automatically keeps the plant on a rolling three-year cycle, with a balanced mix of one-, two-, and three-year-old wood at any time.

You can recognize the old wood easily — it is darker, thicker, and barked compared with the pale, smooth young shoots. Cut those old stems out cleanly at the base, leaving the vigorous young growth to crop the following year. Aim to leave roughly 10 to 12 healthy shoots on a mature bush after pruning. Do not be timid: blackcurrants respond to hard pruning with renewed vigor, and a neglected bush full of old wood will give a fraction of the crop a well-stooled one delivers.

Pruning Red and White Currants

Red and whitecurrants behave nothing like their black cousin. They fruit on short spurs that form at the base of one-year-old shoots and on the older wood, so you want to build and keep a permanent woody framework rather than constantly renewing it. Train the bush as an open-centered goblet on its short leg, selecting 8 to 10 well-spaced main branches that radiate outward like the spokes of a bowl, leaving the middle open to light and air.

In winter, shorten the previous season’s new growth on each main branch by about half, cutting to an outward-facing bud, and prune the sideshoots coming off those branches back to one or two buds to build up fruiting spurs. Their tidy, spur-bearing habit also makes red and whitecurrants superb for training as single- or double-stemmed cordons against a fence or wall, where they save space and crop heavily. If you grow cordons, add a summer prune in midsummer, cutting the current season’s sideshoots back to about five leaves to let light onto the ripening fruit and concentrate the plant’s energy into the spurs. The same open, framework-based approach is used on a closely related fruit — see our guide to growing gooseberries for a near-identical pruning method.

Pests and Diseases

Currants are tough, but a few specific troubles are worth knowing on sight. Catching them early is far easier than fighting an established infestation.

• Big bud mite — the most serious blackcurrant problem. Microscopic mites infest the buds, which swell into round, fat balls over winter instead of slim pointed buds. Worse, the mite spreads reversion virus, which destroys cropping over a few seasons. Pick off and destroy swollen buds in late winter, and if a bush is heavily affected or showing reversion, dig it out and replace it with certified clean, resistant stock.
• Currant aphids — these cause the leaves to curl, pucker, and blister, often raising red or yellow blisters on the upper surface of redcurrant leaves. Squash early colonies, encourage ladybirds and lacewings, and blast heavy infestations off with water; avoid over-feeding with nitrogen, which fuels them.
• Currant and gooseberry sawfly — pale green, black-spotted caterpillar-like larvae that can strip a bush of its leaves in days, working outward from the center. Inspect from mid-spring and pick them off by hand; act fast, because they defoliate astonishingly quickly.
• Currant fruit fly and other maggots — can blemish or drop fruit; good garden hygiene, clearing fallen berries, helps break the cycle.
• Powdery mildew and leaf spot — fungal problems encouraged by crowding and poor airflow. Prune for an open structure, water at the roots not the leaves, clear fallen foliage, and choose resistant varieties.
• Birds — blackbirds and others will strip ripening currants overnight. Net the bushes as the fruit begins to color, or grow them in a fruit cage.

One disease deserves its own mention: white pine blister rust. Currants, and blackcurrants in particular, are an alternate host for this fungus, which devastates five-needle pines. Because of this, growing Ribes is restricted or regulated in some US states, so check your local regulations before planting. Where currants are allowed, choose rust-resistant or rust-immune cultivars such as ‘Consort’, ‘Crusader’, or ‘Titania’, which let you grow blackcurrants without endangering nearby pines. For another Ribes relative that fits naturally into a mixed berry patch, see how to grow elderberries.

Harvesting and Using the Crop

Currants hang in clusters called strigs — the little stems carrying a row of berries. For red and whitecurrants, pick the whole strig once every berry on it has fully colored, snapping it off at the top rather than pulling individual fruit, which crushes them. Strip the berries from the strig later, indoors, with the tines of a fork. Blackcurrants ripen less evenly, so you can either take the whole strig once the majority are dark and glossy or pick over the bush selectively across a week or two, taking the ripest berries first. Fully ripe blackcurrants come away easily and taste richest.

A mature bush yields roughly 8 to 10 pounds of fruit in a good year. Currants freeze beautifully — spread them on a tray to freeze loose, then bag them — which lets you stockpile a glut for winter baking. The high pectin in red and whitecurrants makes them the easiest of all fruits to set into a crystal-clear jelly, and blackcurrants go into jams, syrups, cordials, sauces for game, and the classic cassis. Few crops give so much from so little ground.